this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
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THE POLICE PROBLEM
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The police problem is that police are policed by the police. Cops are accountable only to other cops, which is no accountability at all.
99.9999% of police brutality, corruption, and misconduct is never investigated, never punished, never makes the news, so it's not on this page.
When cops are caught breaking the law, they're investigated by other cops. Details are kept quiet, the officers' names are withheld from public knowledge, and what info is eventually released is only what police choose to release — often nothing at all.
When police are fired — which is all too rare — they leave with 'law enforcement experience' and can easily find work in another police department nearby. It's called "Wandering Cops."
When police testify under oath, they lie so frequently that cops themselves have a joking term for it: "testilying." Yet it's almost unheard of for police to be punished or prosecuted for perjury.
Cops can and do get away with lawlessness, because cops protect other cops. If they don't, they aren't cops for long.
The legal doctrine of "qualified immunity" renders police officers invulnerable to lawsuits for almost anything they do. In practice, getting past 'qualified immunity' is so unlikely, it makes headlines when it happens.
All this is a path to a police state.
In a free society, police must always be under serious and skeptical public oversight, with non-cops and non-cronies in charge, issuing genuine punishment when warranted.
Police who break the law must be prosecuted like anyone else, promptly fired if guilty, and barred from ever working in law-enforcement again.
That's the solution.
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Our definition of ‘cops’ is broad, and includes prison guards, probation officers, shitty DAs and judges, etc — anyone who has the authority to fuck over people’s lives, with minimal or no oversight.
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ALLIES
• !abolition@slrpnk.net
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• r/ACAB
• r/BadCopNoDonut/
• Randy Balko
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• Identity Project
• MirandaWarning.org
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INFO
• A demonstrator's guide to understanding riot munitions
• Adultification
• Cops aren't supposed to be smart
• Don't talk to the police.
• Killings by law enforcement in Canada
• Killings by law enforcement in the United Kingdom
• Killings by law enforcement in the United States
• Know your rights: Filming the police
• Three words. 70 cases. The tragic history of 'I can’t breathe' (as of 2020)
• Police aren't primarily about helping you or solving crimes.
• Police lie under oath, a lot
• Police spin: An object lesson in Copspeak
• Police unions and arbitrators keep abusive cops on the street
• Shielded from Justice: Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States
• So you wanna be a cop?
• When the police knock on your door
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ORGANIZATIONS
• Black Lives Matter
• Campaign Zero
• Innocence Project
• The Marshall Project
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• NAACP
• National Police Accountability Project
• Say Their Names
• Vera: Ending Mass Incarceration
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MODERATORS
Watch "Power" on Netflix and one get the gist. Society needs the police, but there are plenty of sick sadistic mofos in their ranks.
So why the fuck aren't they held to a higher standard than the rest of us?
This is what I don't get. I'm a nurse, and since I (ostensibly) have people's lives in my hand, we are checked and double-checked, have to do continual education, and literally everything we do needs to be documented and audited.
And our goal is always to prevent harm to the patient. Why do people who can legally end someone's life not have the same, or much more strict, standards (I'm asking this rhetorically, I don't really want an answer).
It seems like adapting medical licensing and reporting requirements would help get us on the right track, or at the very least help hold police accountable.
Same here. I'm in a position where I'm liable for over a thousand people if any become hurt or die due to my negligence. If I fuck up badly, I could do serious jail time and never work in my industry again. Plus I had to attend university for eight years.
People can waltz in with no education, complete a training course of just a few months, and become police officers, able to kill or harm others with significant impunity.
Says who?
It’s funny - I live in a neighborhood where I routinely need to call the police. They don’t show up.
Have you tried donating a few hundred thousand dollars to your local police union?
If you need to call the police and they don't show up, but somehow you made it out of that situation, it sounds like you didn't need the police.
Yeah - I’m not sure if the homeless woman thats being abused by my drug dealer neighbor who’s screams wake me up at 3 am is going to make it out though :)
worst take I've read all month
Hilarious that the parent comment https://lemmy.world/comment/10245666 was overwhelmingly supported and offers essentially the same message.
that is my experience with both lemmy and reddit. it's a coin toss as to whether the same message is supported positively or not each time you bring it up.
If there are bad people in the police, there would be bad people without the police.
Some people are bad. Why give any of us more power and less oversight than the rest?
Well that's the real issue, the oversight. It's not that they exist, that's retarded. It's that they have very little oversight, training, or personal accountability. Those things need to be added to the police force.
How anyone wouldn't see that "no police" would lead to either complete chaos, military controlled or a bunch of tiny dictatorships being controlled by the citizens who already owned guns before the police got defunded, which is pretty damn close to chaos, is baffling. The only argument for how getting rid of the police could be a good thing relies on the assumption that only good people will have guns.
Centralized, overwhelming military power makes the formation of alternate military power structures impossible.
The idea of a police force is to prevent the formation of a gang with enough violent power to control others.
Sooo... the police exists to prevent the existence of police?
I think you mean the formation of a different violent gang. One that doesn't extrajudiciously represent the owner classes interests.
People think the police do a lot of things they don't actually do, and aren't required to do.
Police don't -- and don't have to -- protect anyone, prevent crimes - even if they can see someone committing a crime and can stop it - Chase down criminals running from them, go find criminals that have been reported, bring criminals for court dates, and more.
Basically all police are genuinely required to do is file a report when someone reports a crime. And I think that society could get away with not having that.
Basically everything about the justice system that you probably care about and that supports society is done by someone other than a cop, or just isn't actually done at all and people presume it is.
I was standing on a corner in downtown Seattle and someone standing next to me wanted to sell me crack. I crossed the street and a cop pulled up to a red light. While crack dealer still standing there, I tell the cop and point at the guy. He tells me to call 911 and then drove off.
That's the time it dawned on me that they don't really care about crime happening in their face
Assuming that being in the police doesn’t make people worse.
Assuming that that's the only way people become worse.
It doesn't make them worse - the police just gives the worse people a gun, training, and next-to-complete immunity from the law.
So mob rule. Got it.
Well I do for a start. I imagine I’m not the only one.
You do? Unless you're a capitalist... no you don't.
The history of policing is no longer hidden from us like it was in the days before the internet. It's not society that "required" police - it's capitalist parasites that required police to protect them from society.
Society may need law enforcement, but not what we have today.